Bah. Fail. I put some comment in there between "<" for style purposes, and it nuked the whole thing.
Aforementioned "criminal record" entry would have a link to a controlled discussion containing the members involved with incident, cited evidence of allegations of abusive behaviour ( that is not editable content, hardcopy ) allowing "offenders" and accusers to flesh it out, but not have the general public giving their 2 cents all over the place.
Perhaps we can add "jurors" at some stage who can vote on guilty/not guilty at some point in the discussion, but I haven't thought that part through yet.

For almost eight months after launching Stack Overflow to the public, we had no concept of banning or blocking users. Like any new frontier town in the wilderness of the internet, I suppose it was inevitable that we'd be obliged to build a jail at some point. But first we had to come up with so...

I'm probably stating the obvious, but for people who have already accrued large amounts of rep, a representation of respect, shouldn't we have a sort of pentalty system which detracts that hard earned rep in *BIG* ways? After all, they're losing respect.
I'd like it so people who offend get a black mark on their profile, visible only to people with lots of rep, creating a "criminal record" so to speak of bad behaviour on an acccount, and each associated criminal act associated with an account has respective rep reductions connected to it.
ie:
[ Suspended for 2 days for { crime type }, and charged 2000 rep, ]
At least that way, if the discussion at some latter date concludes the conclusion was wrong, the rep charge can be repealed.
( to be similar to our real-world criminal justice system )
At least this way, we've got more "Sane" tools to deal with high rep people on occasional offenses, and more sane tools to track habbitual offenders.
As for people already with low rep, I don't see what a any of the above techniques would do, all they have to do is *suspect* they're being hellbanned/slowbanned and then do what it takes to thrawt the system, whether it be in-band abuse( account jumping ) or out-of-band ( trolling networks outside the scope of the ban ).

For almost eight months after launching Stack Overflow to the public, we had no concept of banning or blocking users. Like any new frontier town in the wilderness of the internet, I suppose it was inevitable that we'd be obliged to build a jail at some point. But first we had to come up with so...